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Minecrafting 141: Islamic Architecture

Minecraft Mojang

No snapshot this week, because most of the people in the Minecraft team are at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. As such, there’s not anything much going on in terms of official news, but that definitely doesn’t mean there’s nothing to talk about.

I’m becoming an increasingly big fan of Redditor Hiddenworm3 and their contributions to the grand world of Minecraft architecture with Islamic designs. The past couple of weeks have seen guides on how to make two different kinds of arch, and this week there’s a guide to building a full mosque in the Fatimid style. It’s extremely impressive stuff, making good use of sandstone. Go check it out if you want to stand out from the crowd on your server, and learn about Islamic culture at the same time.

While I’m talking builds,this pair of modernist survival houses are both pretty nice. This build of The Tower at Bal Moreth is gorgeous, and this mountaintop fortress is the perfect thing to wait out the apocalypse in.

On the official forums, I found this Block Shooter minigame created by YouTuber MrZeffoes.The idea is to shoot as many blocks as possible in one shot – with more points garnered the more blocks you get. It generates 10 random blocks per second, but its creation is complex – requiring more than 25,000 command blocks! You can grab it from Planet Minecraft, it requires snapshot 14w08a or higher.

I also liked this tutorial on how to make your chests bombproof – and by extension, creeperproof. It’s the work of YouTuber BillWarlow and relies heavily on obsidian blocks so you’ll need either a bucket and some patience or a diamond pickaxe and less patience to build it. Got a better design? Let me know below.

Finally, I wanted to highlight this brilliant video by SimplySarc that shows what dynamic torches in Minecraft might look like. Instead of placing them on the walls, you could just hold one in your hand to light up the area. Unfortunately, the computing requirements of bouncing all that light around makes this unlikely to appear in the main game for some time. Ah well. We can just watch this video and weep a little instead.

Right. I’ll leave it there for today. If you’ve seen anything in the Minecraft community that you think I should be highlighting, tell me about it by dropping me an email. I’ll be back with another roundup this time next week.